


The Earthbound Goddess

by Real_Geek_Girl_Goddess



Category: No Fandom, Original Work
Genre: Aliens, Deities, Gen, Magic, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-28
Updated: 2015-07-28
Packaged: 2018-04-11 16:46:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,723
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4443938
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Real_Geek_Girl_Goddess/pseuds/Real_Geek_Girl_Goddess
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>What happens when men attempt to surpass their Gods?</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Earthbound Goddess

**Author's Note:**

> Oldie but a goodie. A remixed version of something I had on FictionPress.

The cool flakes fell on our faces, absorbing our oppressive heat; it did not melt. It is strange, but I better remember a crow that ruffled her ebony feathers and flew at me, scratching my forehead. The cut healed fast and was quickly forgotten. I didn’t pay it any attention because there was snow to be eaten. There hadn’t been snow in as long as anyone could remember and it was an exciting adventure for all of us children.  


“It is a good sign,” the adults had said.  


In November, it had been a delightful oddity in our self-imposed, carbon-fueled, never-ending summer.  


In December, it had been an inquisitive oddity. We asked each other, was snow supposed to fall continuously for days and days?  


In January, it had been a worrisome oddity. No. No, snow wasn’t supposed to fall for so long, even though no one living had ever experienced a true winter in forever.  


In June, the snow was a dangerous oddity.  


Storms arrived violently, on her whim, to ruin our perfectly languid world. Our elderly keeled only feet away from warmth. Travel was impossible, the roads too slick and mass transportation not ready to deal with the onslaught of the enemy, the snow. We froze in our homes, and were forced to evacuate with as many blankets as we could carry, if we even had any, into large buildings in the domed cities that would prevent our collective body heat from escaping. It did little to stave off our misery in the newly arrived winter.  


It was entirely our fault, of course, the adults said.  


You see, our governments have taken to slaying the Created Gods, Gods created by our ancestors to explain things they couldn’t understand (War, Love, Chaos, Childbirth, and etcetera). Our governments had killed a greater majority of them believing that we as a species were advanced enough to handle our own futures instead of entrusting our futures to Gods we didn’t worship anymore. It is of course, impossible to kill off all of the Created Gods, there will always be some small pocket of history in humanity that had Created Gods and whose people didn’t bother recording anything down for our convenience.  


Please, do not ask me how I know what follows.  


There were Gods, however, before the Created Gods. The True Gods, created in the massive heat of the Big Bang.  


They mostly reside in the vastness of our universe, attending to galaxies and the expansion of the universe and the balance of space-time and wormholes, and all that. Too far away, long-lived, and far-sighted to be easy prey. But there was one True God that was within the killing range of our governments:  


The Earthbound Goddess.  


She is a True Goddess only in the fact that her creation did not stem from the belief of a few humans. She was created by the original True Gods. They wanted to do an experiment to answer the questions that plague all Creation:  


What exactly are we?  


What is our purpose?  


Why do we tend to this universe?  


Why do we exist at all?  


As an experiment, they decided to create Life on this and numerous other planets. Their reasoning being, if we create creatures that look like us, we can study them in order to know ourselves. They shall be made in our image, they decided.  
This wasn’t the task of the Earthbound Goddess, to push evolution to select which creatures got to mate in order to make True God-looking creatures. Her task was to only make sure that things didn’t get too bad so that the environment would go awry and become uninhabitable. Keep life alive.  


The Earthbound Goddess is the Goddess of Life on our planet. And she is, comparatively, a nice one.  


A shame she has such horrendous charges, some of the adults said.  


She was there, created in that primordial pond when the amino acids, the proteins and other elements came together in the first form of life. She was there when the first group of cells clustered together and dispensed different jobs to each other. She was there when the first arthropods and cephalopods came to be and fought for their lives in the ancient seas. She was there when the first fungi, the first plants, the first animals made their way to land, seeking shelter from the madness of the oceans. She was there when the amphibians reigned supreme, later when the first insects reigned supreme, later when the reptiles took hold of the world, later when the first skittering dinosaur ran along the banks of a Pangaea pond, and later still when the last of species fell into defeat against the latest cataclysm. She was there to entice and lure the survivors from their hiding places, it’s all right, you can grow anew and stronger now.  


However, just because she was the first to witness these miracles of evolution, does not mean that she stuck around for every single event that occurred to all species as they flashed in and out of existence. She was mostly there for the major events: creation, suffering, and dying off. The Earthbound Goddess had been in the habit of sleeping during the in-between periods, her subconscious powerful enough to keep a check on things and waking her up just before the really important stuff happened. Even Goddesses have to sleep at some time in their eternity.  


One day, about five million years ago, the True Gods came back to check on their 583,459,287th experiment sample, waking her up. The Earthbound Goddess was asked about all of the living creatures on the planet. She recited to them all of the facts that her subconscious had accumulated in her mind. They decided that now would be a good time to introduce the Reagent into a species of lemur-like primates since it had not developed on its own on this planet.  


The Earthbound Goddess came to despise the primates, a little.  


You see, the adults said, she feels a tug on the consciousness of all the minds of animals, from sea sponges to whales. She feels their minds coursing through her blood. Their collectiveness was a major way for her to gather how her world was doing and a way for her to feel not so terribly alone. But, she could no longer feel what the primates were thinking; they seemed to have become so clever in such a short span of time.  


Now, she had encountered clever animals before, octopi and raptors and birds had surprised her many times, but the primates were different in their cleverness. They had just been given a vastly unfair advantage. That was hardly fair to any of her other creatures. But still, there was nothing amiss and all seemed to be going as planned; she went to sleep in the mountains, later attracting some short-faced bears that were on the brink of death and sought her out as a last push for survival.  


When she woke up from her slumber, to find the world drastically changed from its virgin state, she would come to absolutely loathe humans.  


Our governments had found her at the top of a mountain, curled up against the hibernating bodies of the family unit of short-faced bears (they had been kept alive, way past the extinction of their species, only by proximity to the Earthbound Goddess and her life-giving radiation). They took her away, killing the ancient short-faced bears, and put her in a containment unit made of crystal clear diamond. They paraded her through our capital, proclaiming that her death would be the end of the Gods unjust rule over us. It was one of the only times that we could be bothered to leave our air conditioning to enjoy festivities in a normal 63°C morning.  


They made a whole public circus of killing her, even going so far as to hand out small bags of ice for us to chew on while we watched the chamber empty out of all gases. 

But they had only killed a troublesome bastard, who had been trying to blackmail her father out of his extra seat on the starship that was set to leave this Earth when it finally gave in, as an anesthetized stand-in. She had gone through severe plastic surgery to get her features to match the features of the Goddess.  


The real Earthbound Goddess had been taken below ground. Our governments wanted to use her so that they could continue to be reckless in the consumption of our natural resources while her subconscious would make everything habitable once more and even replenish some of the natural resources.  


They found this out through several experiments: put her in a chamber of argon gas and it would become the Earth’s current atmosphere, put her near some barrels of radioactive nuclear waste and it would become inert, put her in the same chamber as a dead dog and a healthy population of decomposing bacteria and even some plants would be given faster than possible. They were going to use her to make the Earth virgin and plentiful once more. Or, if the Earth proved too far gone for even a Goddess to heal, they would take her with them to a new planet. They must have thought themselves so great, using the power of a Goddess, owning a goddess.  


Over the eons, the Goddess’ subconscious had developed into many facets and fail-safes, building on the ones that the Goddess was created with. Her mind felt that something was not quite right, having felt a taste of polluted air on the Goddess’ skin while in transfer from tank to tank while they were experimenting with her, and tried to awake her. But the Goddess was connected to an overabundance of machines whose sole purpose was to make her sleep in glorious ignorance to what her steading had become. 

Her mind fought back and did something which wasn’t very economical, considering the ratio of human to non-human creatures living on the planet.  


Her mind made suffering.  


Her mind ordered poor cockroaches, spiders, dogs, cats, birds, rats, and other creatures within the vicinity to become violent and suicidal towards humanity. We fought back, of course. The animals became enraged when their numbers dwindled even further.  


She twitched and stirred at the anger of her charges.  


She woke up with a roar as she felt the death of her children.  


She tore away at the machines and summoned roots into the underground prison. She saw how many humans were in the facility and gave no second thought to killing them.  


If there are so many down here, where they ought not to be, then there ought to be a lot more. Losing a few hundred won’t affect their population.  


The Goddess sees things in big pictures and measured species on their overall population and well-being. And she saw that humans were killing off her children and her stomping ground altogether.  


We were the threat to life on Earth, now.  


If her job was to keep life alive, then it was also her job to kill humans, no matter the failure of the experiment to the other True Gods.  


You see, how could it be anything but our own fault? , ~~the voice in my head said.~~ ~~I said.~~ the adults said.  


Our governments and all the adults got angry and fought back, of course. They got their big planes and their tanks and their submarines and their guns out. However, it was too hard to get a lock on her. She kept darting in and out of civilian space, which she realized was off-limits until the generals got tired of ordering the scattering of troops when she did and eventually ordered all-out war against the civilian space.  


Her old age, coupled by her inexperience fighting sound-barrier breaking jets and explosives got her caught by plasma charges of the elite God Slayers. She did manage to escape, understanding pain for the first time, and gathered together all the explosives she could find and made a directed explosion to launch herself into the vacuum of space.  


There is a reason she is called, ‘Earthbound.’ If she gets too close to the edge of the atmosphere, her green and black chains become apparent and pull her back to the ground, but not before alerting the other True Gods through spooky action.  


The Goddess of Wormholes was the closest and heard the chain rattling and broke off a piece of her seventy eighth limb and transformed it into a miniature of herself, a part of herself still connected to her mind but not to her body. It enlarged a wormhole and went to the Earthbound Goddess’ aid.  


My father once made a few jokes about how, when feeling threatened, women will gather together like a herd and viciously attack unsuspecting men.  


The same ought to be true with Gods, right?  


There wasn’t one grand battle royale to end it all, though. Even though, they had the entire planet at its knees and keeling in its death throes. The miniature of the Goddess of Wormholes and the Earthbound Goddess simply met at the top of a mountain, had what appeared to be a very short and calm conversation, and then in the flash of a wormhole’s expansion, were gone.  


It’s been a few years, and I would be remiss if I did not admit that I missed the Earthbound Goddess. Even though she launched herself at and destroyed many cities and energy plants and us, she did make the air cleaner, the water drinkable, and the plants stronger.  


I am a selfish child.  


I am nearing the end of my youth, soon to enter into the service of one of the countries that was primarily subjugated to her wrath. Other countries felt that we were all weak in the wake of it, which is true. Our military and superstructure were failing, we weren’t going to last another war intact, the adults said. I couldn’t care in either matter.  


Even though I am considerably older, I still wanted to stay the rigors of adulthood for as long as possible. I still hung around the playground where we played and still ate the treats we ate, even if it is with a newer and younger group. Even so, my dark future looms ahead like something of a beast ready to devour whatever remains of my childhood.  


Something had been bugging me.  


I realize that it was the crow. The crow had not been frail or sickly, had not been loud or begging for food, had not ignored us as others had. The crow had, in fact, cocked its head to the side and studied us. Now that I think about it, it had had the same kind of black on its silent feathers as the ~~crow~~ Earthbound Goddess had had. I asked the children about the crow. They didn’t notice or care, too enveloped in the waning miracle of a tenth year of snow.  


A great amount of energy scanned its way through the city, as far as the eye could see in both east and west. No one else but me seemed to notice. It tingled and shook me as it passed through me.  


I felt sick all of a sudden. I wanted to rip out my lungs and hurl them at the crumbling walls encasing the playground.  


I fall into blackness. But not before noticing that my world was morphing, the people were being unknowingly taken apart and put back together.  


When I awake some time later it was much colder. I realized that the dome was no longer above me like an oppressive turtle shell; I am no longer in my state-issued, biodegradable clothes. I am wearing thick furs and skins. There’s an atlatl in my hand, the corresponding spear a few meters away, embedded in snow. I shiver as I realize that I am also embedded in snow. I manage to awkwardly lift myself from under the gawky cut of the furs. The spear is at the feet of the Earthbound Goddess.  


She shakes out a few black feathers out of her hair and smiles serenely at me,  


“The experiment continues.”  


I wept. I could feel the connection to her in my head.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!  
> If you want, please leave a comment below with questions, comments, or concerns!  
> Word to your mother!


End file.
